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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

Anyone willing to be dependant on this is honestly stupid when you take into account Google's history in this area: unreliability, changes in offerings, changes in pricing, discontinuations of services, hard lock-in, bad customer service, ...

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As the blog post says, Bigtable internally runs virtually all of Google's big services. This means it's rock solid, and it's not about to get discontinued anytime soon.

So just pricing will change, got it :)

You've obviously not tried Google Cloud Platform then.

FYI, in the case of Google Wallet for Digital Goods, Google essentially did what you are saying they wouldn't do.

Google Wallet for Digital Goods was retired a couple of months back, but they still use it on some Google properties. It's still used for the Chrome Web Store developer fee & I think Android, too. They essentially just made it private.

You might argue that BigTable going through the same thing would be too impactful, but GWDG was quite impactful as well. Businesses that had subscribers paying monthly subscriptions via Google Wallet lost those subscribers.

> Bigtable internally runs virtually all of Google's big services

Are you sure? I'm not a Googler but have been told by other Googlers that Bigtable has essentially been replaced internally (though heard it's still similar). So I wasn't sure how much Bigtable is even used anymore inside of Google.

F1 is their other database which powers AdWords http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41344.html

Spanner is the successor to Bigtable. It's not like Google keeps this fact secret.

Actually spanner and Bigtable have different and complementary use cases

The blog post says "the same database that drives nearly all of Google’s largest applications", and I work at Google, so yes, I'm pretty sure ;)

Of course Google has a whole slew of other storage options optimized for various use cases, but some of these are actually built on top of Bigtable.

Haha okay fair enough. Thanks!

You can always move to Hbase ... Google BigTable uses Hbase api.

Until the API's begin to diverge - which will happen.

Right now it's a subset of HBase, but the basic operations are unlikely to change. HBase adheres pretty well to the BigTable paper.

You are intentionally forgoing things like coprocessors, and other advanced stuff listed here[1]

[1] https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/hbase-differences

My thoughts exactly. I will look at the features, but I won't even consider it for production use in our company.

Google Cloud platform didn't have most of your problems

It had all of them. To be more specific, I'm talking about App Engine.

Sometimes I get surveys from Google about how much I like App Engine. I'm always hesitant about marking them too poorly out of fear that they'll decide to shut it down if the results come back too bad. They need a question along the lines of "would you rather that we fixed the issues preventing App Engine from being an amazing, awesome PAAS solution, or shut it down?" question.

Ultimately, I do love App Engine. It's just the really poor support from Google that is letting down what could be an awesome platform. Neglected bugs, outdated docs, key limitations (eg. no https on naked domains, which looks like it will hopefully be fixed soon) and such.

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